Aya-chan and Megumu both seem to be pretty old, so I figured it'd be nice if they were old acquaintances, which led to this story. I liked them having a more normal conversation outside the workplace. As explained in the story, the title is a quote from a very old Chinese book, but isn't it just perfect? Please forgive me, Liu Xie, sir. But also thank you.
Long-nose tengu are the most mainstream today, but looking at the history of tengu as a whole, they're actually a pretty late addition. Originally, basically all tengu were crow-headed. Oh, the good old days... but humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize their gods, so they ended up preferring the more human-looking long-loses. In that mess, a lot of crow tengu who had been worshipped as mountain gods since olden times also ended up being treated as long-noses, but apparently Iizuna-daigongen's fervent cult managed to keep him as a crow. That's why I also like the idea of Megumu caring about her fellow crow tengu.
As Megumu explains in "Starry Gauze, Cloudy Fabric", crows' habit of eating human remains has been emphasized in good and ill, but that also goes for kites. In fact, Konjaku Monogatari includes several tengu based on kites rather than crows. It seems that when the long-nose tengu were born, all these bird-heads were clumped together as "crows" for some reason. Who knows, maybe brown-haired crow tengu are actually kites.Postscript for Each StoryI like Extra bosses who completely change your image of them in the post-battle conversation... Momoyo being close friends with someone so very different in status and thinking was absolutely radiant to me. While bathing in that light, I imagined what it might have taken to get to that point, and turned those hallucinations into this story. I got a bit carried away by that passion and ended up making the longest comic in the history of this circle, but it was actually going to be another ten pages longer. I did everything I could to cut it down to 100 (including covers) as a show of my love for Momoyo.
The reason she's at a river at the start of the story is because a lot of centipede species with blue antennae live in streams. A new amphibious species called the "dragon god giant centipede" (Scolopendra alcyona) was actually identified in early 2021, and it comes in a gorgeous blue color that kind of matches Momoyo-chan if you ask me, so this is a very slight peek at that connection.
Since the original legend of the oomukade of Seta Bridge involves it eating dragons left and right, but Momoyo's profile says it's unclear if she's ever eaten any, I go with the assumption that she is not that particular oomukade. It attacked dragons to make its daughter stronger, and then when it was exterminated, that daughter set out to wander the world as a princess of bugs... or something like that. Momoyo manages to keep a pure mind despite being surrounded by negative thoughts, so she really must've had a good upbringing. I actually climbed Mt. Mikami where she used to live, and got a good dose of both the kindness and harshness of nature. It's a great mountain. Sorry for intruding.
